Another summer movie I saw recently is Super 8. This one came fairly highly recommended. I had heard positive reviews and had friends comment on what a pleasure it was to see. Then another friend posted a comment on Facebook checking the generally overwhelming praise. He still seemed to think it was good, but not the greatest summer movie of our time. I was glad to read a few remarks going against the tide of praise to lower my expectations before I went to see it.
I didn’t go to it when it was still in its initial run; instead, I waited until it was at the second run theater at a nearby mall where matinee tickets are only two dollars and evening shows are four. I went to the 4:30 showing, and my ticket and a soda together cost less than the price of a ticket by itself at a first run theater. Of course, the sound system was a bit low tech, leaving the whole movie a bit muffled, and the seats have seen better days, but in order to save a few dollars, I’m willing to put up with the lesser accommodations, especially if it’s a movie I’m somewhat indifferent about or one that I’m seeing to stay out of the heat and kill a summer afternoon rather than because I’m desperate to see the movie itself. I saw Bridesmaids at this theater a couple weeks ago (and I still need to write about that one), and if I bother to see The Hangover 2, it’ll be either at this theater or on TV. But with Super 8, I actually wished I’d seen it at a nicer theater because it’s a movie that is well made and engaging enough to deserve the full theatrical treatment projected onto a big screen with high quality surround sound.
Let me not get carried away, though. The movie is good enough to deserve to been seen in all its glory, but that doesn’t mean it’s the greatest summer movie ever. Basically, it’s intended to feel like an old Steven Spielberg film, and it does achieve some of that feeling, but it also left me with the desire to go back and watch Jurassic Park and E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Super 8 is good, and it does capture some of the essence of those wonderful Spielberg films, but it also feels a bit like an imitation of them, a forgery of a master artist’s work.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the basic story, I’ll recap here. It’s 1979 in a small Ohio town. Our hero, Joe, is dealing with the death of his mother in a steel mill accident and the newfound reality of living alone with his father, who is unprepared to be a single parent. Summer vacation is starting, and Joe and his best friend Charles are excited to have more time to work on their 8mm zombie movie that they plan to enter in a local film contest (Joe handles makeup and special effects; Charles directs). They sneak out of the house one night to film on a train station platform, and as they film, a train derails. The Army comes to town to clean things up and investigate, and the mystery really begins: what or who was on that train? Why is the Army keeping things quiet? Why do all the dogs in town suddenly want to run away?
Strangely enough, the same elements that work as some of Super 8’s great strengths are also weaknesses. Charles, the young film director, talks about changing his script to add more story because that is what will move an audience. He read an article in a moviemaking magazine about the need for more than just special effects and thrilling adventure. So Charles writes in a wife for the main character, so the audience will understand what’s at stake for him. Charles also realizes that in order to stand a chance at making his movie stand out in the competition, he needs “production value.” So he films as the train passes by and ultimately derails so his film will have more going on than just kids standing around talking. Later, he films in front of the derailed train and near a group of Army guys. The same elements that Charles recognizes as essential to a good film are present throughout Super 8. The dead mother makes the audience more invested in Joe’s character. The conflicts between parents and children add more emotion. The derailing train sequence is a great example of production value, as are the other top notch special effects throughout the rest of the movie.
So if what we go to movies for is to have our emotions played with and to be awed with production value, then Super 8 is a great film. However, I sometimes felt like it was all a bit shallow, like J. J. Abrams, the writer-director, was really just a grown up version of Charles. All he wants to do is have fun making a movie, not because he has a story he feels utterly compelled to tell, but rather because he loves movies and wants to make one like the kind he loves. So the special effects and emotional twists come across as a bit manipulative rather than authentic. Just as Charles wanted to make his version of a Romero film, Abrams wanted to make his version of a Spielberg. I imagine him working on the screenplay and trying to figure out what would make this movie stand out, and just as Charles thinks, “I’ll give the guy a wife,” Abrams thinks, “I’ll give the kid a dead mom.”
It’s hard to explain exactly why I find it a bit dissatisfying. Overall, it is very well made. The audience is as skillfully manipulated as in just about any other movie. And I enjoyed the experience on a whole. Yet I also left feeling a bit empty, like this was only a great movie if I didn’t think too much about it. Or maybe it’s as simple as I mentioned earlier: the move left me really wanting to watch E.T. or Jurassic Park. Super 8 is a great example of just how good Spielberg is, though I can’t explain why he’s so much better than almost everybody else.
Showing posts with label Science Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science Fiction. Show all posts
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Slaughterhouse-Five
Another movie I’ve been intending to write about and haven’t gotten to yet is Slaughterhouse-Five. This is another one directed by George Roy Hill. I think I watched this right around the same time as The Sting (maybe even the same day), but I wanted to wait and ponder the movie a bit before writing about it, and then I went out of town and was dealing with other life issues, and suddenly a few weeks had passed and I still hadn’t written about it.
I’m a bit reluctant to frame my thoughts of Slaughterhouse-Five in the old “book vs. movie” frame. That’s such a tired discussion, but it’s sometimes inevitable. I agree with the idea that the book is nearly always better than the movie. There a few instances where the movie is so incredibly good, it’s close to being a match for the book but still falls short (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Remains of the Day, for instance). There are a few where the movie actually surpasses the book (The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and maybe The Silence of the Lambs). But usually, that cliché that “the book is better” is true. I remember how disappointed I was when I watched the movie Atonement. I loved the book so much that I knew the movie wouldn’t equal it, and even though I feel fairly certain the movie was actually fine, I couldn’t help comparing the two and feeling incredibly let down.
When I found out that Slaughterhouse-Five had been made into a movie, I was surprised. I read the book a few years ago and loved it, but it struck me as the kind of book that would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie. So I was curious and a bit reluctant to watch the movie. And, to my surprise, the movie struck me as a good adaptation.
The book centers on a character who is “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels back and forth throughout his life. One moment he is twenty, the next he is fifty. He doesn’t have any control over where he goes or when. He just slips around. This, of course, leads to all sorts of questions about free will, one’s ability to control the path of one’s own life. Billy Pilgrim has no real choice about how his life will unfold, even as he’s living it. He is merely a spectator observing his life as it happens to him. This structure of moving back and forth through time and space, and having a lack of grounding does not strike me as ideally suited for a movie, but it actually worked reasonably well. There is a certain amount of confusion trying to piece together how everything fits together, but the movie unfolds for an audience much like life itself unfolds for Billy Pilgrim: scenes out of sequence but with an inevitability to them.
One major difference between the book and the movie is that I don’t remember feeling a sense of ambiguity from the book about whether Billy Pilgrim was genuinely “unstuck in time” or whether he was suffering some delusions; but in the movie, I think one could reasonably argue that toward the end of his life, Billy has become mentally unstable and is simply suffering hallucinations and confusing memory with the present. The thing that works best for the movie, however, to tip the balance toward the view that Billy is actually suffering from some time travel phenomenon rather than mental illness is the performance of the lead actor, Michael Sacks. He plays the character throughout at every age, and although the character grows older, there is a constant innocence to Billy, a naiveté that shines through. It becomes easy to believe that he accepts his fate, that he understands he has no control over the passage of time around him, of where and when he’ll be next. Sometimes, he struggles with it, but ultimately, he seems to accept his lot and move forward and backward passively. That passivity is tough to keep engaging, but it works. Had Sacks tackled the role with more dynamism, the film might have failed. It strikes me as a performance that is perfect in its simplicity, but would be easy to ignore or dismiss. I looked up information on Michael Sacks after watching the film and was disappointed to discover that he made few movies and retired from acting nearly twenty years ago. I wonder if his performance was dismissed as too simple and not engaging and this lead role in a significant film actually scuttled his career rather than launching it. If so, that’s a shame because he is just right for this role.
There is another difference that stood out to me as well. One thing I particularly like about the book is the metafictional aspect of it. It begins with a discussion by the narrator, seemingly the author Kurt Vonnegut, about how he has wanted to write this book for a long time and has struggled. This sense of reality outside the book adds an extra layer to it, a recognition that the fiction is fiction, but a sense that there is a larger purpose being explored through fiction. Without that frame, the movie feels somewhat lacking in comparison.
One additional element that stands out to me about the movie is the occasional lapse in point-of-view. We follow Billy Pilgrim throughout his life, through World War II, through married life afterward, all the way to a distant planet when he is abducted by aliens, and even to the moment of his death. The story demands a close point-of-view limited to that character’s experience, yet that isn’t what the movie gives us. The movie begins with Billy’s daughter and son-in-law, and there is an extended comic sequence late in the movie that follows Billy’s wife. These shifts away from Billy’s consciousness feel out of place and become distracting flaws in the film’s coherence.
Although I hate to phrase my thoughts quite so simply, the bottom line is that the book is better than the movie. But the movie is worth checking out in its own right. I would be curious what somebody who had never read the book would make of the movie, whether they would appreciate it more since they wouldn’t be comparing it or if they might appreciate it less since they lacked going in the understanding of the unusual chronology. Although it falls short, it’s still a good attempt to adapt a book that was not written to be easily adaptable.
I’m a bit reluctant to frame my thoughts of Slaughterhouse-Five in the old “book vs. movie” frame. That’s such a tired discussion, but it’s sometimes inevitable. I agree with the idea that the book is nearly always better than the movie. There a few instances where the movie is so incredibly good, it’s close to being a match for the book but still falls short (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Remains of the Day, for instance). There are a few where the movie actually surpasses the book (The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and maybe The Silence of the Lambs). But usually, that cliché that “the book is better” is true. I remember how disappointed I was when I watched the movie Atonement. I loved the book so much that I knew the movie wouldn’t equal it, and even though I feel fairly certain the movie was actually fine, I couldn’t help comparing the two and feeling incredibly let down.
When I found out that Slaughterhouse-Five had been made into a movie, I was surprised. I read the book a few years ago and loved it, but it struck me as the kind of book that would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie. So I was curious and a bit reluctant to watch the movie. And, to my surprise, the movie struck me as a good adaptation.
The book centers on a character who is “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels back and forth throughout his life. One moment he is twenty, the next he is fifty. He doesn’t have any control over where he goes or when. He just slips around. This, of course, leads to all sorts of questions about free will, one’s ability to control the path of one’s own life. Billy Pilgrim has no real choice about how his life will unfold, even as he’s living it. He is merely a spectator observing his life as it happens to him. This structure of moving back and forth through time and space, and having a lack of grounding does not strike me as ideally suited for a movie, but it actually worked reasonably well. There is a certain amount of confusion trying to piece together how everything fits together, but the movie unfolds for an audience much like life itself unfolds for Billy Pilgrim: scenes out of sequence but with an inevitability to them.
One major difference between the book and the movie is that I don’t remember feeling a sense of ambiguity from the book about whether Billy Pilgrim was genuinely “unstuck in time” or whether he was suffering some delusions; but in the movie, I think one could reasonably argue that toward the end of his life, Billy has become mentally unstable and is simply suffering hallucinations and confusing memory with the present. The thing that works best for the movie, however, to tip the balance toward the view that Billy is actually suffering from some time travel phenomenon rather than mental illness is the performance of the lead actor, Michael Sacks. He plays the character throughout at every age, and although the character grows older, there is a constant innocence to Billy, a naiveté that shines through. It becomes easy to believe that he accepts his fate, that he understands he has no control over the passage of time around him, of where and when he’ll be next. Sometimes, he struggles with it, but ultimately, he seems to accept his lot and move forward and backward passively. That passivity is tough to keep engaging, but it works. Had Sacks tackled the role with more dynamism, the film might have failed. It strikes me as a performance that is perfect in its simplicity, but would be easy to ignore or dismiss. I looked up information on Michael Sacks after watching the film and was disappointed to discover that he made few movies and retired from acting nearly twenty years ago. I wonder if his performance was dismissed as too simple and not engaging and this lead role in a significant film actually scuttled his career rather than launching it. If so, that’s a shame because he is just right for this role.
There is another difference that stood out to me as well. One thing I particularly like about the book is the metafictional aspect of it. It begins with a discussion by the narrator, seemingly the author Kurt Vonnegut, about how he has wanted to write this book for a long time and has struggled. This sense of reality outside the book adds an extra layer to it, a recognition that the fiction is fiction, but a sense that there is a larger purpose being explored through fiction. Without that frame, the movie feels somewhat lacking in comparison.
One additional element that stands out to me about the movie is the occasional lapse in point-of-view. We follow Billy Pilgrim throughout his life, through World War II, through married life afterward, all the way to a distant planet when he is abducted by aliens, and even to the moment of his death. The story demands a close point-of-view limited to that character’s experience, yet that isn’t what the movie gives us. The movie begins with Billy’s daughter and son-in-law, and there is an extended comic sequence late in the movie that follows Billy’s wife. These shifts away from Billy’s consciousness feel out of place and become distracting flaws in the film’s coherence.
Although I hate to phrase my thoughts quite so simply, the bottom line is that the book is better than the movie. But the movie is worth checking out in its own right. I would be curious what somebody who had never read the book would make of the movie, whether they would appreciate it more since they wouldn’t be comparing it or if they might appreciate it less since they lacked going in the understanding of the unusual chronology. Although it falls short, it’s still a good attempt to adapt a book that was not written to be easily adaptable.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Source Code
I just saw Source Code at a second run theater. I don’t remember hearing a whole lot about it when it was released several weeks ago. I vaguely remember seeing a trailer at some point, a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that he liked it, and a podcast I listen to referred to it as interesting. It wasn’t one that I was especially drawn to from the trailer, but because I heard it was interesting, I glanced at some reviews (which were generally fairly positive) and figured it would be worth checking out at some point, maybe on cable down the road. But then I noticed it was playing at a second run theater, and since my semester just finished and I’m in the mood to just relax a bit as summer break begins, I decided to see it.
I think the reason that it didn’t get as much buzz as some other recent movies is that it’s one of those science fiction movies where the premise is hard to explain well in a trailer; furthermore, the premise doesn’t really make a lot of sense. However, if you just go with it, it’s really a good time. Here’s the situation. There’s a bomb on a train (no this isn’t a new sequel to Speed). The train has already blown up. But our hero wakes up on the train in another man’s body eight minutes before the explosion. He’s being sent back in time to try to discover who the mad bomber is so he can prevent a second bomb from destroying the city of Chicago. I know: What? But there’s an explanation for how the military scientists can send somebody back in time into somebody else’s body, but only for eight minutes at a time: something called source code. How does source code work? Blah, blah, blah. Quantum physics. Blah, blah, blah.
You can see why it was tough to make an appealing trailer from this material. And, seriously, it sounds pretty ridiculous. But this movie is thrilling. It reminded me of several other movies. There’s a pinch of Speed (but in a good way), a dash of Memento (because the movie begins in the middle of things with a guy waking up not knowing where he is or how he got there or even who he is), a heap of Groundhog Day (as he relives the same events, only eight minutes at a time instead of a full day at a time), and even Inception (since there’s the weird world of “source code” and the sort of real world after the explosion and they keep going back and forth between the two). And all of those elements make for a fun, engaging movie.
It isn’t just thrills, however. Yes, there’s the mystery of trying to find the bomber and the mystery of trying to figure out what the hell is even going on, but there’s also a fair amount of character development. And I think the performances of the main actors are really what make this movie work so well. Jake Gyllenhaal, in particular, gives this oddball premise a sense of weight. As I watch the events unfold, I’m far more concerned with how he feels than with whether or not he can prevent a nuclear bomb from destroying millions of innocent folks. And by the end of the movie, I had actually run the gamut of reactions from sitting up in my seat with excitement to laughing to pondering the notion of multiple parallel universes to even tearing up with emotion.
The one caution I’ll give here is that this might be the kind of movie that is best to go in without big expectations. I went in thinking, “I’ve heard it’s interesting. I don’t exactly know what the whole story is, but I’ll give it a try.” And I was really surprised by how enjoyable it was. I wonder, though, if I would have liked it quite so much if I had expected it to be amazing. Often expectations make a big difference. The movie that everyone raves about turns out to be good but also disappointing. So to prevent you from having that experience, I’ll add a few final thoughts: the premise is ridiculous, it does bog down a little in the middle when he’s going back through the same eight minutes over and over again, and the end takes maybe longer than necessary to wind down. See? It’s not that amazing. So go in thinking it’ll maybe be a decent way to distract yourself for a couple of hours, and you might be surprised how good it is.
I think the reason that it didn’t get as much buzz as some other recent movies is that it’s one of those science fiction movies where the premise is hard to explain well in a trailer; furthermore, the premise doesn’t really make a lot of sense. However, if you just go with it, it’s really a good time. Here’s the situation. There’s a bomb on a train (no this isn’t a new sequel to Speed). The train has already blown up. But our hero wakes up on the train in another man’s body eight minutes before the explosion. He’s being sent back in time to try to discover who the mad bomber is so he can prevent a second bomb from destroying the city of Chicago. I know: What? But there’s an explanation for how the military scientists can send somebody back in time into somebody else’s body, but only for eight minutes at a time: something called source code. How does source code work? Blah, blah, blah. Quantum physics. Blah, blah, blah.
You can see why it was tough to make an appealing trailer from this material. And, seriously, it sounds pretty ridiculous. But this movie is thrilling. It reminded me of several other movies. There’s a pinch of Speed (but in a good way), a dash of Memento (because the movie begins in the middle of things with a guy waking up not knowing where he is or how he got there or even who he is), a heap of Groundhog Day (as he relives the same events, only eight minutes at a time instead of a full day at a time), and even Inception (since there’s the weird world of “source code” and the sort of real world after the explosion and they keep going back and forth between the two). And all of those elements make for a fun, engaging movie.
It isn’t just thrills, however. Yes, there’s the mystery of trying to find the bomber and the mystery of trying to figure out what the hell is even going on, but there’s also a fair amount of character development. And I think the performances of the main actors are really what make this movie work so well. Jake Gyllenhaal, in particular, gives this oddball premise a sense of weight. As I watch the events unfold, I’m far more concerned with how he feels than with whether or not he can prevent a nuclear bomb from destroying millions of innocent folks. And by the end of the movie, I had actually run the gamut of reactions from sitting up in my seat with excitement to laughing to pondering the notion of multiple parallel universes to even tearing up with emotion.
The one caution I’ll give here is that this might be the kind of movie that is best to go in without big expectations. I went in thinking, “I’ve heard it’s interesting. I don’t exactly know what the whole story is, but I’ll give it a try.” And I was really surprised by how enjoyable it was. I wonder, though, if I would have liked it quite so much if I had expected it to be amazing. Often expectations make a big difference. The movie that everyone raves about turns out to be good but also disappointing. So to prevent you from having that experience, I’ll add a few final thoughts: the premise is ridiculous, it does bog down a little in the middle when he’s going back through the same eight minutes over and over again, and the end takes maybe longer than necessary to wind down. See? It’s not that amazing. So go in thinking it’ll maybe be a decent way to distract yourself for a couple of hours, and you might be surprised how good it is.
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